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The Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship began operation in 2011 at McMaster University. A common question is, what do you do? In this session we will discuss the formation and purpose of the centre and the role of the library and librarians. Centres vary greatly from institution to institution, our purpose here is to outline specifically what we do and how it fits into the larger academic context.

Description: This will be a 40-45 minute talk on the benefits of using open source technology in building digital collections with 15-20 minute demonstration. The rest of the time will be left for questions & discussion.

Benefits: 1) Explain the benefits of Open Source technology over proprietary software. 2) Show the collaborative benefits of using Open Source software with digital collections.

The presentation will briefly cover the Digital Commons product by Berkeley Electronic Press as used by McMaster University Libraries. Moreover, the presentation will cover the theses and dissertation submission and review process, the journal creation & publishing process, department/faculty taxonomy structure for the IR, and the relationship between Bepress and McMaster University Libraries.

Local clouds in the sky with diamonds? (with John Fink) - OLA Super Conference

This session will cover cloud services for libraries. It will cover 4 main points; a) what is a cloud, b) why you might not want to use external cloud services, c) different local cloud setups (kvm/xen/ubuntu eucalyptus, d) what you do with your cloud once you have it.

Shaping our future: has unionization made a difference? Academic librarians share their thoughts and experiences. There are some very recently organized academic librarians at McMaster University and Guelph University and others within the last decade at Queen?s and Western. What have their experiences been in the academic unionized environment? What were their expectations upon unionizing--were they fulfilled or not? This will be a qualitative presentation with results from informal interviews with librarians working at these universities and guest panelists. TRY conference participants will be able to ask front line librarians if unionization has brought change to their professional working lives.

McMaster University's Digital Collections (http://digitalcollections.mcmaster.ca) site went from proof of concept to production very quickly. Usability testing was never done and the content of the site was crammed into an out-of-date standard university template. In an attempt to write the wrongs of the initial implementation, we undertook a project to redesign the entire site from the ground up using good user experience design principles, redesigned interactions, and usability testing at multiple stages during the process. This session will outline the project and lessons we learned throughout the process.

This session will cover the proof of concept to production of the digital collections infrastructure that was created with Drupal by the digital initiatives team at McMaster University Library. In addition, the session will cover the current initiatives that are under way with the project, such as linked data support (RDF), KML support and time permitting, a demonstration of the backend of the site and front end of the site.